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MY DEAR HOWELLS,--There you stick, at Belmont, and now I'm going to
Washington for a few days; and of course, between you and Providence
that visit is going to get mixed, and you'll have been here and gone
again just about the time I get back. Bother it all, I wanted to
astonish you with a chapter or two from Orion's latest book--not the
seventeen which he has begun in the last four months, but the one which
he began last week.
Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, "George didn't take
the cat down to the cellar--Rosa says he has left it shut up in the
conservatory." So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat.) About 3 in
the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, "I do believe I hear that cat
in the drawing-room--what did you do with him?" I answered up with the
confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and
said "I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm,
and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between
him and the cellar." Language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's
disgust. But the sense of what she said, was, "He couldn't have done any
harm in the conservatory--so you must go and make the entire house free
to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to
the drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you, I should have
admired but not been astonished, because I should know that together
you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately
blunder all by yourself, is what I cannot understand."
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